h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Well, now an opinion writer at CNN is using the word "coup".

http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/01/opinions/bannon-trump-coup-opinion-ben-ghiat/index.html

The man who has sold his tattooed skin:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-38601603

So many things to say about this, so little time...

Right!?


And it's not even that good as a tattoo! It's two dimensional and hackneyed.

It reminds me of one of Roald Dahl's stories. I think it was by him. About a tramp who had a picture tattooed on his back by someone who later became really famous.

This one made a few of the newspapers here, but not the BBC, oddly. It's a shocking story of how a RAF pilot nearly crashed a military passenger flight after getting a camera he was playing with stuck in the controls:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/07/raf_voyager_zz333_flt_lt_andrew_townshend_court_martial/

The joy of stocks: The weird world of stock photos.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-39217548
This is a 'news' item in which the BBC lambasts the use of stock photos. Ironically the BBC are a big user of such imagery, so its slightly puzzling why they should run such a story.

Its always been a bone of contention with me that they use such images since they cost a minimum of £300 to buy. So every time you see these stock photos on a BBC page, thats two people's license fee payments gone up in smoke.

This news item makes the matter worse by going overboard in its use of such photos. There's 12 of them so a total of £3600. Thats translates to roughly 24 people's license fee payments for a pointless news story.

So £300 buys a single use of them? Or the right to use them repeatedly?

The BBC doesn't use them half as much as my employer. Every single corporate e-mail or document is full of these ghastly things. Why do they always have to be so cheesy?

There was a good 'Dave Gorman's Modern Life is Goodish' episode involving stock photos...

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The cost of using the photos is usually on a sliding scale, and I believe £300 is about the cheapest for a one off use.

However, a quick look at Thinkstock prices seriously undermines my point: the most popular pricing is £125 per month for 25 downloads each day. My point remains true for similar sites though.

Where did you get that "minimum of £300 to buy" figure?

ThinkStock's highest subscription rate, which includes 25 image downloads per day is only $300/month.

And even if the images were £300 each, non-stock images aren't free. Photographers gotta make a living too, ya know.


As an aspiring professional photographer, I doubt I would sell my images to a stock house; they offer a pittance per image typically. But I very well might purchase some stock photos to use for compositing my own images. (But I wouldn't purchase from ThinkStock or Getty, I can find much cheaper prices for individual D/Ls elsewhere for generic scenery shots I might use.)

That said, there is some High Weirdness in the stock photography realm.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/daves4/unexplainable-stock-photos

I've also looked into using stock photos too in the past, and the cost depends a lot on what you're using them for. £300 is the price I came across most often.

Personal use is cheap, but public or commercial use is a different matter, where the costs increase dramatically. Even on the Thinkstock site where they show the costs of so many downloads per day those prices may not apply depending on what you use the image for.

I of course understand that photographers need to make a living, but the point I was trying to make is that the BBC's excessive use of stock photos is questionable when the cost can equal two people's license fee payments.

BTW, I'm sure you know that if you're looking for generic images there are plenty of free resources.

Yep. One of those is my state government. Any photography done for our state agencies, like the Department of Highways, Parks & Wildlife, &c, becomes part of their collection.

The BBC has a deal with Getty where the cost is a *lot* less than £300, we're looking at pennies. I believe it involved Getty getting to use a lot of the BBC's original stock library from when they sent their own photographers out.

The BBC has some gems in its archive. Sam/Natalie found this one when I need a picture of Grey Owl: A53811777

It quickly became clear to me after my post on this subject that I should have done a little more research first. Thanks for the extra information.

Suspected terrorist Incident currently in progress at Westminster:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-39355940

Dinosaurs are British:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-39305750

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Classification of species has been quite arbitrary until the development of things like mitochondrial DNA sequencing. Dinosaur speciation will likely remain rather arbitrary lacking intact DNA samples.

{The first dinosaurs may have originated in the Northern Hemisphere, possibly in an area that is now Britain.}

"Possibly in an area which is now the Isle of Wight" - spit it out, man.